The program to store and then dispose of the plutonium declared excess to national security needs seems to be in trouble. The storage facility at Mayak is under serious fire in Russia - from the Duma deputies who claim that the site is vulnerable to a [U.S.?] attack to local citizen protesting against "U.S. bringing 20,000 containers with its weapon plutonium to store at Mayak" (sic!). Not to mention the rumors about the United States taking control over Russian nuclear forces that have driven most agreements about the Mayak facility underground.

The plan to build a MOX fabrication facility at Seversk (Tomsk-7) has also collapsed - Rosatom just announced that it postponed the construction indefinitely - the project is almost $400m short of its $1.2b budget and there are problems with getting technical documentation from France.

Of course, all this just reflects that nobody really cares if Russia (or the United States, for that matter) has 34 more tons of weapon-grade plutonium - it is just about the fifth of all 125-150 metric tons that the Soviet Union produced. It would be nice, though, to have it properly stored. It looks like the only way to do so at this point is for the United States to give up on access rights, write off the cost and just leave the storage facility to Russia.

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Now that the plans to build a MOX fabrication plant in Russia all but collapsed, Rosatom officials are hinting that they would like to use the BN-800 fast breeder reactor to burn the weapon plutonium. Using plutonium breeder to burn...

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As Linton Brooks mentioned today, the United States and Russia resolved the legal issues that held back construction of MOX fabrication facilities. A groundbreaking ceremony was held in South Carolina on October 15th. The idea is that the MOX fabricati...

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